There are several types of analysts on Wall Street today, each producing different types of reports for different kinds of clients. One well-known type of analyst is the sell-side analyst who produces sell-side research. Sell-side analysts are employed by brokerage houses to analyze specific companies and write in-depth research reports, conducting what is sometimes called primary research. These reports are used to “sell” an idea to individuals and institutional clients. Individual investors can gain access to these reports by having accounts with the brokerage firm that generates them. For example, to get research from Merrill Lynch, one need have an account with a Merrill Lynch broker. Sometimes the reports can be purchased through a third party. Institutional clients such as mutual fund managers get research from a brokerage's institutional brokers.
A typical sell-side research report contains a detailed analysis of a company's competitive advantages and provides information on company management expertise and how the company's operating and stock valuation compares to a peer group and its industry. The typical report also contains an earnings model and states the assumptions that are used to create the forecast. Sell-side reports are updated on a regular basis as new information becomes available. Further, sell-side analysts generally make themselves personally available to meet and talk directly with buy-side analysts and potential buyers.
Information for sell-side reports may be obtained by reading the company's SEC filings, meeting with its management, and, if possible, talking with its suppliers and customers. Research may also entail analyzing the company's publicly-traded peers for the purpose of better understanding differences in operating results and stock valuations. This latter approach is called fundamental analysis because it focuses on the company's fundamentals. Such research can be a time-consuming process that limits a typical sell-side analyst to specializing in a small number of industries and covering a small group of companies within those industries. The content and nature of sell-side reports may be limited by government SEC regulations.
A second type of analyst is the buy-side analyst. Buy-side analysts are employed by fund managers and pension funds. Like sell-side analysis, a buy-side analyst specializes in a few sectors and analyzes stocks to make buy/sell recommendations. Buy-side researchers typically differ from sell-side researchers in various respects: they follow more stocks (30-40), they write very brief reports (generally one or two pages), and their research is only distributed to fund managers—not to sell-side analysts or to investors at large. Further, while sell-side analysts are limited to reporting on companies that their brokerage represents, buy-side analysts are not thus limited. In fact, buy-side analysts constantly work to identify and report on companies that they expect to be of current interest to their customers. Readers will understand that different buy-side analysts use different criteria for identifying ‘hot’ companies.
A buy-side analyst can cover more stocks than a sell-side analyst because they have access to more information, including sell-side research. They also have the opportunity to attend industry conferences, hosted by sell-side firms.
While company fundamentals are widely accepted indicators of a company's performance, fundamentals of publicly traded companies are generally available to everyone. Much of the added value of buy- and sell-side research comes from the ‘other’ data included in such research. In some instances, commercially available, analytical data is used by analysts as part of their reports. For example, Nielsen™ provides data relating to consumer audiences in the Internet, media and entertainment industries. NPD provides point of sale data in the video game industry as well as data relating to food services, apparel and appliances. IDC provides data relating to the information technology and telecommunications industries, while IRI provides data relating to point-of-sales activities in various industries including consumer goods. Yet another source of data comprises the industry standard practice of collecting data by performing deep, automated searches of publicly available data sets, such as those available on the Internet. These and other well-known data sources are available to analysts in developing buy- and sell-side reports. While such data is useful and interesting in certain respects, it also has certain drawbacks. For example, such analytical data sources are relatively limited in number. The data available from such sources is generally determined by the collector as pertinent to an industry and may not be particularly useful with respect to any particular company within that industry. An analyst may be lucky to find one set of data having limited relevance to a particular company of interest.
Beyond fundamental analysis and the use of commercial analytical data, the remainder of data included in most analyst reports tends to be anecdotally based and/or quite subjective to the personal opinions of both the analysts and users. This means that, despite analysts' best efforts, much buy- and sell-side research suffers from the disadvantages of being anecdotal and subjective.
Because significant investments are made based upon analyst reports containing, in large part, anecdotal and subjective data, reliance upon such reports exposes the consumers of such data to risks and the providers of such data to potential liability. The present inventors have determined that it would be highly desirable to develop new ways of analyzing company performance, in addition to fundamental analysis, that is based on objective mathematical analysis. Such analysis would desirably be based on proven and repeatable objective principals and would not be subject to the vagaries, inconsistencies and subjective-ness of existing buy- and sell-side analysis.